thoughts about etips.com

Our History

2 brothers: Gonzalo & Sebastian Juarez. We are from Salta, Argentina. It’s a lovely pre-hispanic city in the north of Argentina. Beware of llamas there.

Llama crossing!

Gonzalo, went to University in Fort Kent, Maine, USA. Soccer Athletic full-scholarship. Worked as Financial Analyst for Hewlett-Packard as Head of Finance in the online Store for EMEA at Geneva, Switzerland. He is good at marketing & business, don´t dare to play poker with him!.

I, Sebastian, game developer, studied at Buenos Aires Univ.. Original Creations developer at Gameloft. E-Commerce Latam Manager for Gameloft. I love game development. Don´t dare to play Civilization with him.

While Gonzalo was at HP and I at Gameloft, we decided to start our own business. We saw that new phones would let people carry a lot of rich data with them, and exchange that data through internet.

That’s us!

What we thought

We started building electronic books for old Java phones, in 2007. That’s where the name came from, electronic tips: eTips. We sold those books through aggregators.

After trying different books, and also exploring BlackBerry market we decided in 2011, to give the Travel market a try. And in a different platform: Apple iPhone. We built our first travel guide: Paris Travel Guide in English for iPhone 3.

We saw a big potential in the new iPhone, we developed our own Augmented Reality Engine at that moment, and were the firsts to have it working on the new iPad. That took us to be introduced in the new Apple iPad 3 keynote.

And we decided to go global, so we begun to translate our content and expand it into more cities.

In 2012 we had 150 Travel Guides published, and some of them in 9 languages. At that point we reached the profitable level. That’s very important for us as we are 100% bootstrapped. And 5 persons working full-time for eTips. Giving true value to the market is key for us, and make a living out of that.

In 2013 we tried to discover new horizons, we opened our Kindle Store (70 ebooks published), and our iBooks Store. We learned a lot from it.

In 2014 we decided to reach the whole world, and not only the ones who could afford to buy our products. So we offered our guides for free, as in beer. That let us discover new customers from all around the globe. And we learned more from regions we would never had thought of.

In 2015 we decided to offer richer and deeper content, so we begun doing Point-of-interest Guides, like museums, parks, cathedrals…you name it.

Some of our titles

We believe strongly that technology will change the way we discover new destinations. How we learn and explore them. We want to be those change makers.

What we want

We want to be a travel destinations platform for the mobile universe.

We know travellers are all special and unique, and we think the travel experience has a lot of room yet to be enhanced, specially with new medias such as augmented and virtual reality.

Travellers deserve to easily learn and experience from the destinations they have chosen. “Don´t miss a Thing”, that’s really important for us.